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IMAGINE THAT AFTER THE TITANIC SANK, as survivors waited in lifeboats beneath a starlit sky, an overly articulate survivor interrupted the silence with a soliloquy on why the worst was yet to come.

This image came to mind sitting in a Ritz-Carlton ballroom as Pippa Malmgren, an economist who focuses on the impact of politics and policy on financial markets, systematically demolished any sense of stability harbored by the few hundred traders and portfolio managers in her audience.

Attendees of the Chicago Board Options Exchange's Risk Management Conference may have felt proud for surviving the financial crisis of 2008 -- until Malmgren convincingly described a future of riots caused by surging food prices, energy inflation and countries struggling to pay debts.

"It's an awful human feeling to walk down the street and pass people and realize they have no idea what is coming," Malmgren, head of the Canonbury Group consultancy, hurled at the audience.

Thin, bespectacled Benn Steil, a fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations, which many call a shadow U.S. State Department, clearly knows what's coming. He turned graphs of bland economic data into gory glimpses of a financial future that could give an investor good reason to doubt anything U.S. government officials say about the economy.

All that was missing was timing. If Malmgren and Steil could have predicted when the hobgoblins will hit the financial system, the conference room would have emptied as everyone stampeded to call their offices with trading instructions and then joined together in group prayer.

Instead, attendees were left struggling with an even more pronounced inability to time investing strategies to the second part of the financial crisis. That part is expected to come when the government starts trying to pay for the rescue programs that saved the financial system from collapse.

The absence of timing ironically reinforces the financial markets' key trait: a lack of clarity. Trading volumes are sharply lower, traders at the conference said, because their clients have no real idea where to invest money safely. Strategists say investors increasingly call to discuss ideas, yet rarely trade.

For those who look to the options market for insights into how the smartest investors view stocks, take solace in the fact that everyone is focused mostly on basics like refining electronic-trading systems or picking stocks with high dividends and strong cash flows.

"It's a lot more Graham and Dodd, and a lot less 25-year-old hedge fund managers," a strategist at a top bank said. He now focuses on helping clients buy and sell stocks without having to jump through esoteric hoops of highly leveraged trading.

To see the future, but not know when it will arrive, is naturally unsettling for anyone paid to anticipate such things.

"The problem," as a junior trader at a major investment bank said so precisely, "is that we trade options, and we need a sense of timing to trade."